Hairyloon
Joined: 20 Nov 2008
Posts: 15436
Location: Today I are mostly being in Yorkshire.
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 Posted: Mon Feb 24, 25 4:33 pm Post subject: Cooling server farms and suchlike things. |
 
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I was recently moved to think about the cooling systems for server farms and other high intensity IT applications and wondered if anyone anywhere has tried recovering some of the energy through heat engines to make electricity.
The instinctive response is that it goes against the laws of thermodynamics, but I think that it does not because of the amount of energy being pumped into the system.
As a thought experiment, if you connect a heat engine to a dynamo and drive a heat engine with an electric fire, then will the dynamo produce electricity?
If the engine, dynamo and heat source are suitably matched, then of course it will. It would be horrendously inefficient, but that's not the point because instead of the electric fire, we have a bank of processors doing useful work.
As is, they do that work and generate heat which is typically thrown away, although in some cases it is used for heating...
Which brings me to another thought: where people are using electricity for heating, why not put that electricity through a bank of processors first and do some calculations with it?
Leaving aside the question of what calculations we might do, as far as I can work out, we would get the same amount of heat either way, so the only reason to not do it is the cost of the hardware, and how many obsolete graphics cards are there sat tucked away in drawers? |
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